The Functioning Alcoholic Who Financed Thirty Years of Drinking – Hank J.
About This Speaker Tape
A 12 by 15 garage house in Hermosa Beach, a turntable with ten speakers, and a bottle of cheap vodka. This was the wreckage of Hank J.’s life. For thirty years, Hank functioned as a salesman, winning plaques for outstanding performance while running scared, shuffling old papers on his desk to avoid being fired, and financing his addiction through a cycle of consolidation loans. He describes his existence as a series of fantasies—imagining a white Lincoln Continental and a sentimental card to win back a wife who had divorced him three times.
The bottom wasn't a single moment but a slow collapse: a son who mirrored his dysfunction and a wife whose drinking turned her into a whirlwind of violence, culminating in a blackout where she slashed all his clothes and tried to gas the house. Hank reflects on the paradox of the "functioning" alcoholic, noting that he didn't just drink; he financed thirty years of drinking. Now sober, he relies on a Higher Power to keep his feet on the ground.
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